I want to explore my experience being “homeless” at 17, as this was a period where I experienced a drastic change to my entire way of life, and when I feel I developed a lot as a person and learned to cope with these changes as a result. This period matters a lot to me and I feel that expressing this in my own work could help me process the rest of the situation that I haven’t yet dealt with. I wish to develop this project through photographs I took both while homeless and through staged recreations in a photobook.

My own experience of being homeless felt more freeing than anything, as I wasn’t tied down by people or other commitments, which I honestly look back on with nostalgia, although the conditions, and some incidents, were awful. After speaking with people who’ve had a similar situation, it seems to be a usual feeling that people experience in the first few weeks, before the reality settles in. I don’t particularly have a focus on certain moments or places in mind, but I want to create a rough narrative following what I did and where I went to find someplace to stay. Whilst I want to discuss the freedom I felt with the whole situation, I also want to go into the risks and complications of living on the streets in somewhere like the UK. I spent a short while of my time homeless living in the back of a friend’s run-down old land rover in one of the most dangerous council estates in his area, where I’d sometimes wake up to sirens, glass breaking, fights, and on one occasion I woke up to a man staring at me through the windows. These sorts of things often made it harder to sleep at night, as the land rover was my only relatively safe place to stay, and it wasn’t fixed enough to move.

Two photographers I could look at for this projects are Theo Gosselin and Jim Goldberg. Gosselin explores the sense of freedom and adventure that a lot of young people need to experience, through his own travelling in a campervan – his use of a more vintage look in his image is what’s so attractive about his work to me. Goldberg, looking at his photobook ‘Raised by Wolves,’ focuses on American children raised in extremely poor conditions, and what they suffer through just to survive. This raw, unforgiving portrayal of a situation that was far worse than anything I’d experienced is what draws me to his work, which could be something I aspire to recreate in my personal study. I could also blend the two styles together, creating nostalgic, idealised images that almost euphemise the horrors of having no shelter, whilst also highlighting the freedom that comes with no commitments.

I could also research homelessness statistics around the world and the UK, or maybe just for each city or town that I was in.